Link Types and Categories

From: Eric Armstrong (eric.armstrong@eng.sun.com)
Date: Wed Jul 26 2000 - 11:35:15 PDT


Thinking about it, Doug was right (surprise).
Link types serve more functions than simply
identifying themselves as hide/show/include.

In fact, the decision to hide/link/include is
a property of the view, not of the link. So
one might choose, as defaults, to:
  * hide glossary links
  * show citation links
  * include responses

Now, the category of the target node *could* be
used to make the view-decision -- but that would
require traversing every link to determine the
proper handling. Nobody wants to live with the
kind of performance that will result from that.

The reasonable alternative, therefore, is to
include semantically-oriented link types. At
a minimum, then, we have:
  * glossary (<gls> or <def>)
  * citation (<cite>)
  * response (<resp>)

Node categories are still required for IBIS
discussions. A particular response might be a
question, argument for, or argument against.
I suspect, though, that we don't want to include
all those options in the link types -- most
particularly because the category list will grow
and evolve dynamically in each installation of
the system.



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